On the importance of rotational play

"crocobaura;c-18359568" wrote:

"simmerorigin;c-18359541" wrote:

"crocobaura;c-18359513" wrote:

"simmerorigin;c-18359477" wrote:
I totally agree on the importance of rotational gameplay. What's tricky is incorporating it into an open world where the world is simulated all at once. I thought about how this could be done. One of the key issues is age synchronicity, or keeping ages maintained as you play the same period of time with every family.

My specific solution:

I propose a Universal Calendar feature where every single save file starts on Sunday, Week 1. And every sim's birthday is represented as a specific day and week in the calendar (for premade sims, their birthday would be in a zero or negative week indicating the past). If you play rotationally, you could play that same Week 1 for all those households. Once that is done, the entire universe timeline moves to Week 2 and unplayed households age up that week. In order to move on to the next week, you would need to reconcile all of the timelines i.e. play each "My Households" household until Sunday, Week 2 in order to restart the rotation. To keep track of age syncing, every sim age is a subtraction of the current day and week number MINUS their birth date. This allows ages to be calculated rather than a simple incrementing of +1 day to their age each day (the latter tends to be prone to over or undercounting in some games).

https://forums.thesims.com/en_US/discussion/998194/i-beg-you-ea-sims-5-must-support-rotational-gameplay/p1

This isn't about open world and synchronizing time and the sims' ages but rather about being able to create cause and effect in your neighborhoods, have meaningful interactions between sims and be able to change the storyline at neighbourhood level depending on how you play your characters. It would require a dynamic neighbourhood system, where every sim and their traits, skills, actions really matter and could potentially influence the gameplay in a certain direction.

Disagree with your assessment. At least in the way that I play. Creating cause and effect among neighbors goes hand in hand with keeping aging in sync. If former classmates become elderly while your sim is still a teenager or your active household ages but the townies around you perpetually stay at the same age, this hinders interactions among households and the NPC pool. Especially in regards to who can marry and reproduce with each other.

Interactions don't work well if each household is siloed within their own timeline.

And in regard to open world, well we saw with the Sims 3 how single-household, legacy-focused that game is by design. You play one family and the world around you is simulated by the game. You don't control the cause and effect neighborhood story like in the Sims 2. So that's relevant.

Being able to have classmates age up same rate as your sim is important, especially if you aren't going to play them, I understand that, but if you want to play them as well in your rotation then you absolutely need the flexible time and aging. In TS4, all sims are on the same timeline, when you switch households, the day of the week and the seasons remain the same. You can enable aging for everyone to age at the same rate, or just your current household. In rotational gameplay you play several households so you take care of them gradually as you go, because all households and sims in them have meaning to your gameplay, they are not just there to provide background decor, so in the end everyone ages up exactly how you want them to, when you want them to, with the relationships, skills, careers, aspirations, etc. you want them to have. In order to do this you need to be able to have flexible time and aging that you can pace it in such a way that you can switch through all the families you want to play. However, with a dynamic neighborhood system, I think the emphasis would be more on creating gameplay drama and aging, whether individual or not, would be just a small component of it.